Taking Antidepressants During Pregnancy Is Linked To Autism

Hear this, mamas. According to a new report, taking antidepressants while pregnant can increase your baby’s odds of having autism after he or she is born.

Good Housekeeping says that Canadian researchers reviewed data from more than 145,000 pregnancies between the time of conception until the children were 10 years old. Women who took antidepressants during their second or third trimesters had an 87% higher risk of having a child diagnosed with autism than mothers who did not take antidepressants.

“Use of antidepressants, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, during the second and/or third trimester increases the risk of autism spectrum disease in children, even after considering maternal depression,” Anick Berard of the University of Montreal and her colleagues wrote in their report.

While I know that depression and autism are both HUGE topics in our world of mamahood, I’ll say that I was incredibly cautious about taking any sort of pills when I was pregnant with my two babies. In fact, even when I found out that I had kidney stones while I was pregnant with my son, I did anything just not to take my doctor-prescribed painkillers because I didn’t want to hurt my unborn child in anyway (but OMG was the pain real!). I ended up rolling on my bedroom floor for hours trying to ease the pain until the kidney stones popped out on their own (and thank goodness for that, too).

Tell us Hot Moms, what do you think of the study?

Hear this, mamas. According to a new report, taking antidepressants while pregnant can increase your baby’s odds of having autism after he or she is born. Good Housekeeping says that Canadian researchers reviewed data from more than 145,000 pregnancies between the time of conception until the children were 10 years old. Women who took […]